Apply color to all tracked changes in Story Editor

Track changes isn’t exposed in the Find/Change window, but you can add a character style to additions with the following one-liner (first create a character style called change and set any formatting):

app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().changes.everyItem().characters.everyItem().appliedCharacterStyle = app.documents[0].characterStyles.item(‘change’);

Peter

Doesn’t have to be complex (or even a script). You can apply some form of highlighting as a local override, e.g. underline.

Alexandro, if you do it in your way, you highlight only additional and not removed text? If this is enough for you, conditions could also work:

(function() { 
  var curDoc = app.activeDocument;

  if (!curDoc.conditions.itemByName("Highlight").isValid) {  
    var colorToHighlight = curDoc.conditions.add(
      {name:"Highlight",indicatorMethod:ConditionIndicatorMethod.USE_HIGHLIGHT, indicatorColor:UIColors.YELLOW}
    );
  } 
  else {
    var colorToHighlight = curDoc.conditions.itemByName("Highlight");
  }

  curDoc.conditionalTextPreferences.showConditionIndicators = ConditionIndicatorMode.SHOW_AND_PRINT_INDICATORS;
  curDoc.stories.everyItem().changes.everyItem().characters.everyItem().appliedConditions = [colorToHighlight];
} () );

Edit: It seems also possible to loop through all changes and different changes have a different type, e.g. changeType = DELETED_TEXT. So a more or less complex script could set a flag, draw a frame or whatever at this location or could even display the deleted text …

Kai

Condition highlights don’t show in a PDF.

If you want to apply a colour you can use this one-liner:

app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().changes.everyItem().characters.everyItem().fillColor = app.documents[0].swatches.item(‘C=0 M=100 Y=0 K=0’);

This uses the default colour ‘C=0 M=100 Y=0 K=0’ — make sure it’s there, or use any other colour.

Peter

Alexandro, Peter gave you this one line for adding local Magenta.

I think, the benefit of conditions are, that conditions are easier to control than local styling. Did you see the conditions-panel with the dropdown and those 3 options? If you want to remove the condition from special words, highlight the word and click on “unconditional”.

Kai

Alexandro, it seems, that for Peters version the quotation marks are messed up. This can happen during copy/paste > should be straight ones.

> if the condition is applied to visible text and you use “ConditionIndicatorMode.SHOW_AND_PRINT_INDICATORS”, I can see here the hightlighting in a PDF.

Ok.

Good to know, that both solutions are helpful :)

It seems not to be possible, to add a shortcut to “Unconditional”. But we can script this command and give the script a shortcut:

(function() { 
  var curSel = app.selection[0];

  if (!(curSel && curSel.hasOwnProperty ("baseline")) || curSel.constructor.name == "InsertionPoint") {
    alert("Select some text with a condition!");
    return;
  }
  if (curSel.appliedConditions.length > 0) {
    curSel.applyConditions([], true);
  }
} () );

Alexandro, the last script is only for single words, if you want to exlude the highlight in the PDF. If you want to delete everything at the end, simply delete the condition. I have no desire for building a dialog with a dropdown at the moment ;-)

While this seems to work for track changes, I can see another use case for conditions: marking words for an index. At the moment I’m working on a book with 250 pages and the author used a character style with magenta for highlighting words. Allthough I talked to him, only apply the style to words with black, he applied the style also to paras with gray or other color and messed up the complete document. So either use local styling or a condition.

Hi Alexandro,

InDesign has some problems with tracking and speed. I hear such freezing from the InCopy-corner. Peter and I use the everyItem() function. I would assume, that it could speed up things, when we use an array instead.

Can you please provide a example with e.g. 50 or 100 track changes. It would then be possible to test both methods against a timer.

Kai

You can sent it to [email protected]. Please provide a idml, not indd.

Some interesting stuff!

Alex has about 1200 conditions on 70 pages. With the line from Peter

app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().changes.everyItem().characters.everyItem().appliedCharacterStyle = app.documents[0].characterStyles.item(‘change’);

there is no result and I crashed InDesign after 15 minutes.

var curDate  = new Date();
var oldStamp = curDate.getTime();

var allChanges =app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().changes.everyItem().getElements();
var nChanges = allChanges.length;

for (var i = 0; i < nChanges; i++) {
  var curChange = allChanges[i];
  var nCharacters = curChange.characters.length;
  if (curChange.changeType == ChangeTypes.INSERTED_TEXT) {
    for (var j = 0; j < nCharacters; j++) {
      curChange.characters[j].fillColor = "Magenta";
    }
  }
}

var curDate  = new Date();
var curStamp = curDate.getTime();
var difSec   = (curStamp-oldStamp)/1000;
alert (difSec);

122 seconds

var curDate  = new Date();
var oldStamp = curDate.getTime();

var allChanges =app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().changes.everyItem().getElements();
var nChanges = allChanges.length;

for (var i = 0; i < nChanges; i++) {
  if (allChanges[i].changeType == ChangeTypes.INSERTED_TEXT) {
    allChanges[i].characters.everyItem().fillColor = "C=0 M=100 Y=0 K=0";
  }
}

var curDate  = new Date();
var curStamp = curDate.getTime();
var difSec   = (curStamp-oldStamp)/1000;
alert (difSec);

30 seconds!

So it seems, that a combination of everyItem() AND getElements() + counting the length of something outside the for-loop is much faster.

Kai

Help with tables wanted: How to color/underline all text changes in tables?

Found this page and use the script. It is working very well for underlining all the tracked text changes in Indesign 2022.
This is working great for regular text, but not for text in tables. And I work with financial reports filled with tables.

How to color/underline all text changes in the tables?

Would be great if this can be resolved.

Sibren

This is solved by Brian Pifer of designtimesolutions.com

I changed the first line to:

var allChanges = app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().tables.everyItem().changes.everyItem().getElements();

Sorry. This is a very basic question. How do you actually use these? Are they saved as text files with the jsx extension and added to the scripts panel (that gave me an error)?